Reasons for doing things

Research has been done in psychology showing that while people can readily supply reasons for their behavior, these appear to be incorrect and created after the fact. In other words, these post hoc rationalizations are nice, believable stories that we come up with based on what we've just done.

The question that follows this very interesting finding is, "Well, what are the actual reasons for people's behavior? How can we discover these?" Presumably if the reasons why people think they do what they do are wrong, then there must be an accurate explanation somewhere. The question is, what is the nature of this "actual" explanation?

Some might be inclined to give an alternative intentional, psychological reason as the "true cause" of the behavior in question. I believe that such an approach is incorrect. Attributing intentional psychological causes to behavior, e.g. "I did it because I selfishly wanted you all to myself!" implies that these intentional causes exist unconsciously, hidden beneath our incorrect explanations. This implies a hidden, yet unified self that exists below the surface, which I find troubling, not because its "scary" but because it doesn't really make a lot of sense.

A much more reasonable option is to see any given action as the product of many different unconscious motivational cues coming together at any one point in time (in cases where our actions are not entirely and intentionally consciously guided--in these cases our understanding of why we did something is probably accurate).

Following this, the idea of someone doing something for any reason only exists on the level of linguistic-semiotic sense making. It's not that we're unaware of the causes of some of our actions. It's that if one asks for the "actual cause" of any given action, this is a question that often makes not sense on the linguistic-semiotic level.